The purpose of this study is to investigate the mystery as to why public displays invite use in some places but not in others. This is a comparative study of UBIOulu, where Open UBI Oulu project installed 11 UBI hotspots around Oulu city centre in 2009. In the most active time there were 18 UBI hotspots available. UBI hotspot is a large touch-sensitive screen and it is publicly located, and anyone can use it freely. UBI hotspots are located both indoors and outdoors, six of which were selected for this research. swimming center Out of all the hotspots, the one located at Raksila swimming center gets approximately 55–85% of total clicks, depending on the weekday. This thesis tries to establish the reasons for that popularity.
Prior research was studied to obtain research data on contextual use of technology; privacy, propinquity and social designation. Furthermore, situated use of public displays was studied also to find out what the impact of weather, climate, time of day, and weekday, for example, have on hotspot usage.
Data for this study was collected in the autumn of 2015 and it consists of hotspot usage statistics in a period of one week. Six hotspots under study were analysed in detail from the social and architectural point of view.
On the basis of the results of this thesis, two conclusions can be made. When UBI hotspots or similar are planned to be installed, they should be located in places that already have a lot of visitors, who spend time there anyway. The content and the context should match, so that the displays will reach those audiences who are interested in the content. In the Oulu case, the displays were most appealing to children.